University of Pennsylvania Professor: American God a 'White Racist'

Anthea Butler, an Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Graduate Chair in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, writes in Religious Dispatches magazine that she has decided that the acquittal of George Zimmerman means that America’s God is a white racist. Butler wrote:

God ain’t good all of the time. In fact, sometimes, God is not for us. As a black woman in an nation that has taken too many pains to remind me that I am not a white man, and am not capable of taking care of my reproductive rights, or my voting rights, I know that this American god ain’t my god. As a matter of fact, I think he’s a white racist god with a problem.

Butler continued to write that good conservative American Christians fear black and brown people:

When George Zimmerman told Sean Hannity that it was God’s will that he shot and killed Trayvon Martin, he was diving right into what most good conservative Christians in America think right now. Whatever makes them protected, safe, and secure, is worth it at the expense of the black and brown people they fear.

Butler wrote:

While many continue to proclaim that the religious right is over, they’re wrong. The religious right is flourishing, and unlike the right of the 1970s, religious conservatism of the 21st century is in bed with the prison industrial complex, the Koch brothers, the NRA–all while proclaiming that they are “pro-life.” They are anything but. They are the ones who thought that what George Zimmerman did was right, and I am sure my inbox will be full of well-meaning evangelical sermons about how we should all just get along, and God doesn’t see race.

Please send them elsewhere.

Butler concluded by saying that religious people have a responsibility to tell “all of the story” and not just the “nice touchy-feely parts,” and that Christian Americans are some of the “biggest racists.” She made a call of responsibility for all of those “not for human flourishing.”